8 Then
Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone
was lying against it. 39 Jesus said, “Take away the stone.” Martha,
the sister of the dead man, said to him, “Lord, already there is a stench
because he has been dead four days.” 40 Jesus said to her, “Did I
not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?” 41 So
they took away the stone. And Jesus looked upward and said, “Father, I thank
you for having heard me. 42 I knew that you always hear me, but I
have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may
believe that you sent me.” 43 When he had said this, he cried with a
loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” 44 The dead man came out, his hands
and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus
said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.” [1]

I chose the Jonah passage to compliment
this, the raising of Lazarus story for obvious reasons. Many people look at the
Jonah, being swallowed by the whale, and inside the great fish for three days
before being spit out on dry land to be a parallel to Jesus being in the tomb
for three days, and you could also make the parallel of course to Lazarus in
the tomb. . . We know the story of Jonah, and perhaps this prayer that he
speaks from the belly of the fish is one of my favorite passages in all of the
Bible. . . I get it . I understand it. . . It has always spoken to me:

10
Then the Lord spoke to the fish, and it spewed Jonah out upon the dry
land. [2]

Jonah says this because he has run away from God, and
despite the running he is being delivered by God, but the best part of this
story is that it is only chapter two. We get to know where the story ends,
where it goes from here. He goes back to Nineveh where God had been sending him
all along, and then God does what Jonah was worried he'd do, he forgives
Nineveh and spares them. . . and Jonah is bitter about it. He becomes
disillusioned to the whole thing, forgetting how he himself too has been
spared. . . Wouldn't it be nice to know what happens to Lazarus, the rest of
the story, having been brought back from the dead to live, to have to live in
this slow moving, world of time and tears? Wouldn't it be nice to know what
happens next? Wouldn't it be nice to know what Lazarus thought about Jesus,
life, death, and salvation?

Because it tells us Jesus loved him,
and it tells us that he had been dead for four days. It tells us that there
would probably be a strong odor. It tell us that a large stone sealed him
inside the tomb. It tells us that Jesus was greatly disturbed again, as he had
been just before he began to weep in what we read last week. It tells us that
he asked that the stone be moved away, it tells us that Jesus said to Lazarus,
crying out to him in a loud voice, Lazarus come out! And it tells us that
Lazarus came out, covered in strips of cloth, and that those strips of cloth
should be taken off of him, unbinding him, so that he can be let go. He is let
go, and the story is over. At least this story. . . we do find the name Lazarus
again later in the gospel. . . Jesus dines with Lazarus again and his sisters,
and it is then that Mary anoints Jesus with the perfume, and Judas gets angry,
and we hear his name one last time when it says that he needed to fear for his
life as well because the Jews wanted him dead too, like he represented the
power of Jesus, and the high priests and scribes were desperately trying to
keep all of that under wraps because they were afraid of how the Romans might
react. . .

But other than that, it's all we
get. . . don't you wish there was more. I wrote the poem in the bulletin with
this idea in mind:

Wouldn’t it be great
to talk to Lazarus,

To get to hear from
him, what he felt,

What it feels like to
die, to fall headlong

Into the abyss, and be
raised from it,

To be called from his
tomb, his shroud,

The stink of his own
decay, to come out,

And live. What would
life be like for him?

Wouldn’t it be great
to know, if only

He’d been asked, or
followed, we’d know,

And we’d be invited
into the tomb, and out

Again, born a second
time, to follow

The shepherd and eat
the bread of life.

If he’d written a
gospel, what would it say?

And it's not just Lazarus. . . I've
often wished we could hear more from the other recipients of Jesus' miracles. .
. . like that blind man, or like the man crippled who was hanging around those
pagan baths, or the married couple from Cana, or the woman whom Jesus saved
from stoning. . . but we don't, and that is basically the case in the other
gospels, too. If there was one demographic of biblical New Testament characters
who don't get enough air time it would have to be the people whom Jesus heals.
It is so much the case that people are always trying to bend the stories together
to get more information about them. Mary
Magdelene is a huge example. Her story is quite interesting because she is
almost the opposite, we only have the after story for her, but people have used
their imagination to connect her name to a healing or an earlier encounter with Jesus, often the
woman saved from the stoning.

Perhaps it is just wishful
speculation, inspired by this great desire we have to know more, to feel more,
to be able to hear direct from those who experienced Jesus in a truly profound and
personal way, but there is a movement within Biblical Scholarship that is
trying to show, prove, and make the claim that the Gospel of John, this fourth Gospel,
was actually penned by Lazarus, and not John the Disciple, son of Zebedee. . .
most of it is connected to the description: disciple whom Jesus loved. . .
because earlier on in this story it says how much Jesus loved Lazarus, and
refers to him as the one whom Jesus loved. . . and there is other evidence that
has to do with geography, the closeness between Bethany and Jerusalem. They
point to pieces of stories from the other gospels that connect Lazarus and Mary
and Martha to Simon the Leper, connecting them as his children. . . much of the evidence is really compelling. .
. it is certainly as compelling as the very fleeting evidence that we have that
John the son of Zebedee is the actual author, either. . . They work to disprove
that tradition by claiming that the gospels being given names of authorship
comes late in their usage, and that granting them an Apostolic connection would
have been a big deal. . . you may wonder why an apostolic connection would be
important, but to be honest it is still the reason that there is no agreement
of union between the Presbyterian and Episcopal Churches. . . . but the truth
is, with the Roman persecution of Christianity going on, there is not much that
is definitively known about those first one hundred years, so anything is
possible. And to be honest it doesn't really matter who the author is. . . that
would be worth arguing over, but it is interesting to take into account the
idea that Lazarus could be the author because of what it would mean to the
interpretation.

Think about it, if you were Lazarus,
and you had been raised from the dead, if you had tasted death, and been born
into new life, it would make sense that you would write a gospel like John's,
one with a real emphasis on believing and being granted life, one that
emphasizes being born again. One that seems to center around you being raised
from the dead, as this one does, because in many ways this is the turning point
of the gospel, the high water mark of Jesus and the anger of the Jews before he
enters Jerusalem. It has seemed that their anger has been growing with each
miracle, culminating to new heights with this one. You'd probably see the world
in a much more black and white way, and there is that here, there is you either
believe or you don't, there is not judgment there, it isn't ragging on people
who don't believe, but it states constantly and frankly that some people
believe and some don't, that some are in Jesus' flock and that it would seem
that some are not, that some recognize Jesus' voice and others just don't, they
just never do. It's all here. It also makes sense that Jesus' language and
talking would be on a different plain like we've seen, that there is a great
spiritual quality to what Jesus says, that there is a great promising quality
to what Jesus says, and that there is no doubt in the writer's mind that Jesus
is certainly Lord, and all that he claims to be, True Bread, the light, the
word, the Good shepherd, the true vine, light coming into the world of
darkness, the way, the truth, the life, the resurrection and the life. It makes
sense that the writer could be Lazarus. . . or at least someone just as touched
by Jesus, because the promise and the connection is there in spades, written by
someone who has felt the truth in their own life very deeply in a changing moment.

He makes some serious claims here as
well, about life and faith, believing and eternity. . . And he makes it known that
all of those promises apply to us as well.

He writes in John 20:30-31

0 Jesus performed many other signsin the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in
this book.31 But these are written that you may believethat Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God,and that by believing you may have life in his name.

So that You. . . we are the promise,
we are invited and so have the ability to be touched, believe, and receive life
in the same earth shaking way as Lazarus does. . . . So that leaves us with one
important question, having thought about the intense point of view of this fourth
gospel, having thought about what that point of view could mean, it leaves the question:
what gospel would we write? What is our point of view? What truth would we seek
to share with the world? What would it look like, and how bold and confident would
it be? It is interesting to think about for sure. . . . amen.